At 4:04 PM -0500 7/20/07, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
Let's discuss Galen Rowell's "Cloudy Autumn Morning", which is on
the Mountain Light web site at
<http://www.mountainlight.com/AA-images/aa_1181_480.jpg>
Once upon a time Galen was considerably more minimalist than he
seemed to become as he aged.
To me, this image is terribly overdone.
1. It's not an autumn morning to me, those clouds are pre-morning -
they're sunrise, not morning.
2. It's not cloudy, either. There are clouds in the sky, but
they're not cloudy.
3. There are so many points of focus in the image that one cannot
figure out what to look at. Looking about one discovers:
the moon
the intense not-autumn, but spring colored flowers in the foreground
the strong reflection
the mountain range
the three trees with their mirrored reflection
the very sharp edges of the plants
4. The sun tipping the moutains tops is being supplemented with fill
flash on the bushes in the foreground, so obviously that one can't
miss it. Galen didn't usually do things that obviously and that can
be controlled in Photoshop and should have been.
5. There is no focal point, another thing that Galen did not usually
forget. The image is horizontally very layered - sky, mountains,
water, bushes. When I did a weekend with Galen in 1994 he stressed
leading the eye with S shaped lines from the viewer away.
Somebody else's turn now.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.landsedgephoto.com
http://e-and-s.instaproofs.com/
